Search This Blog

Notes from the Home - February 29, 2016

The always curious Randy had a question
Saturday: “Why is it the C-side garbage is always full of shit, and the B-side’s
isn’t?” By shit, Randy meant shit, feces, excrement, crap, poop, doo-doo and
the like. Randy is one of the maintenance men.

During the week, James gets the
large cart that sits beneath the garbage chute in the C-building, pushes it
outside and throws its contents into the dumpster. John, the third maintenance
man, does the same thing with the B-building garbage. While James and John are dealing
with the garbage, Randy circles Covenant Woods in a golf cart, picking up
scraps of paper and whatever other trash is spoiling the beauty of the
place, firing up the leaf blower when necessary and tending to the doggy-doo
collection cans.

The the three maintenance take turns coming in on
Saturdays, when only one of them works. That man starts
the morning by doing all the garbage chores. Thus, every third Saturday, Randy
carefully observes how B-building garbage and C-building garbage differ. “The
C-side is always full of shit. They don’t even bag it. They just throw the
dirty diapers down the chute. What’s going on?”

I entered a plea of ignorance. Al
used to discuss his bowel movements in graphic detail, but he did his business
on the toilet. He did wear a diaper, but that was more for Number 1 than Number
2. When he did “shit in the goddamn diaper,” he would tell us how long he had spent
cleaning himself up. I think he always disposed of the diaper properly. I am sure he did. I mean, he did live in the B-building.

* * *

Russ had to pick his old man up off
the floor Sunday morning. He called at quarter till nine to ask if I needed to
get groceries. I did, and he said he’d be over in an hour to take me
to Publix.

As the appointed time neared, I
made myself presentable, got my wallet and transferred from the motorized
wheelchair to the manual chair. Well, not quite.

The problem is, the manual chair
needs a brake job. The chair, which I got late in 2007, carted me – with Nancy
pushing most of the time – around Paris, Lucerne, Florence, Rome, Venice,
Munich, Amsterdam, and several intermediate points before it was a month old. By the time it
made the trip down here to Columbus in March, 2012, it had also been to London,
San Antonio, the Grand Canyon, Montreal, San Diego, Boston, and here, there and
everywhere in the greater Ashtabula area and Northeast Ohio.

The old chair just ain’t what she
used to be. Sitting in the motorized chair, I leaned forward, took a firm hold
of arms of the manual chair, counted to five, said, “OK legs, let’s go,” slowly raised my posterior off the seat of the motorized chair, braced
myself on the arms of the manual chair, which started moving backwards, and I
went ker-plop. A few minutes later Russ arrived and gave me a lift.

That’s my story, and I am sticking
to it. I will not mention my balance, which has gone from iffy, to
questionable, to doubtful, to if there is nothing solid to hold on to I
am likely going to fall on my face. And I refuse to discuss how weak my legs are these
days. Nor will I acknowledge that my right leg, which functioned normally until a year or so ago, is now as ornery and uncooperative as its partner
on the left.

But, I suppose I ought to mention
those things when I visit Dr. Miller, the primary care guy, this week, and Dr.
Verson, the neurologist, next week.

* * *

Alas, the legs aren't the only problem. When I saw Dr. Verson in December, I told him I was ready for a new wheelchair. A few days later, the phone rang. The phone was in my pants pocket. It is so easy to slide the phone into the pants pocket, and, all too often, it is impossible to get the stupid thing out of the pocket before the caller is directed to voicemail.

When I finally got the phone out of the pocket it told me I had one missed call. A moment later, it told me I had a voicemail message. The message was from Columbus Home Medical Equipment; a gentleman said that they had received an order for a scooter from Dr. Verson, but unfortunately, they are not in network with my Humana insurance. "I have notified Dr. Verson's office, and they should be contacting you," he said.

Several days went by without a call from the doctor's office, and then a few more. I started to call them one day, then I closed the phone and put it in my pants pocket. "Look," I said to myself, "you're going to have different insurance in January. (I always talk to myself in the second person.) Why don't you wait until after the holidays? By then you'll have all the information, all the numbers they'll need." Sounded good to me.

I called the Columbus Clinic in January, and asked to speak to someone in Dr. Verson's office. The call was transferred to someone who listened as I told her about the call from Columbus Home Medical. My biggest concern wasn't the insurance, my biggest concern was that Dr. Verson's order was for a scooter. "I need a wheelchair, a motorized wheelchair. There's no way I'll be able get on a scooter without falling." I told her. "I will pass this along, and someone will be getting back with you," she said.

No one got back to me. A week later, I called them and went through the same routine and was told that someone would get back to me. Another week or two went by without a call from the doctor's office, so I called again. It was a replay of the other two calls. A few days later, I did get a call from the Columbus Clinic. The information I had given them had been passed along, the caller told me, and someone would contact me soon. Ha!

By this time, giving the subject of a new wheelchair a break seemed to be the wiser course. The wheelchair was working fine. And I am scheduled to see Dr. Verson on March 11th. Better to talk to him face-to-face than try to reach him through a maze of telephone answering people.

What do they say about the best laid plans of mice and men? On the evening of February 11th, after enjoying a meal in the Covenant Wood's dining room, I flipped the wheelchair's on switch, gently pushed the joy stick, and nothing happened. Well, nothing good happened. A message on the control unit said the second motor was disconnected, and when the chair moved, it moved slowly, always circling to the right. Lucas was kind enough to push me and the chair back to the apartment.

The next morning, Russ came to take me shopping. Before we left I had him push me to Al's apartment. Isabelle, who died almost two years ago, told Al she wanted him to have her wheelchair in case he ever needed it. After Isabelle passed, the wheelchair sat in Al's apartment collecting newspapers, magazines and junk mail. "Why don't you use the wheelchair?" people asked Al when he started having trouble walking. "I can't drive that goddamn thing. I'd probably kill someone." And once or twice a week, Al told me I needed to take Isabelle's wheelchair. "I don't need it," I'd tell him. "I already have a wheelchair. Give it to someone who really needs it."But that morning, I was the one who really needed it. Al was unaware of this last gift to me, but with the blessing of his nephew Harry, I rode away in Isabelle's wheelchair. If all goes well, it will get me where I need to go until I can get a new one.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Life is good at Covenant Woods." That is what the folks who run Covenant Woods say about the place, anyway. For the last four-and-a-half years, I have been in agreement - on occasions, even hearty agreement - with that motto. Not so, this last week.

Wednesday, I joined Mildred, Ethel, and Ruth for dinner. They are delightful ladies, wonderful dinner partners. Brenda was our server. She is seldom delightful, and she very often falls well short of pleasant.

After taking our orders, Brenda returned with three salads: one each for Mildred, Ethel and me. "May I have a salad?" Ruth asked. "You didn't order a salad," Brenda told her in the manner of an angry, impatient mother speaking to her recalcitrant three-year-old. A month or two ago, she spoke in the same demeaning tone to Anna. That night, when Brenda stopped to pickup some dirty dishes off our table, Ethel, who was too full to finish her dinner, asked for a to-go box. When Brenda returned with the …

Here I am at the Covenant Woods Retirement Community in Columbus, Georgia, where life is good so long as you don't mind lying in bed and listening to the neighbor listen to some guy rant until eleven o'clock or midnight or the until the wee hours of the morning. Now, to be fair, this doesn't happen every night, just three or four nights a week.

The problem began after Leila moved out of Covenant Woods, and my current neighbor moved into the apartment next door. A week or two after she moved in, I asked my new neighbor if she could turn down the TV, or whatever it was she had on nearly every night. "That's my son," she said. "You'll have to talk to him." "Not my job," I told her.

I did, however, call the Covenant Woods' number on those nights when the neighbor's son felt his right to play the TV or CD or other device trumped my right to a reasonably quiet trip to Dreamland. The Covenant Woods' security person would either ge…

Here in Columbus, Christmas seems a long way off. Beautiful weather will do that. And we've had beautiful weather: chilly mornings, pleasantly cool afternoons. abundant sunshine, gentle breezes. The mornings say it is fall, mid-October. The sun warms, and by afternoon, these late-December afternoons feel more like April. The weatherman is saying it will be partly cloudy on Christmas Day, with a high of 75 with a 10-percent chance of rain. I don't remember Christmas being like that in Ashtabula or Bethel Park.

* * *
It is Friday morning, just after four o'clock. I have been up for an hour, and I have been awake since one-thirty. I don't understand it. Getting to sleep has not been a problem; getting enough I sleep has. I get in bed most nights between nine-thirty and ten-thirty, quickly fall asleep, and wake up three or four hours later. In no hurry to face the day, I spend an hour-and-a-half trying to get back to sleep. As the body…